What’s love?

We are not negative people. On the contrary, we are very positive, happy and uplifting people in a cynically funny sort of way. So this week we decided to take a turn for the better and, after spending two weeks debunking the love myths, write about everything that love is. The good news is that we do not need two weeks to write all of the positive things about love because people that find love and recognize it for the beautiful thing that it is do not usually need to invent stupid stuff to screw it up. It takes creativity and imagination to really screw something up. Oh oh, there is the cynical coming out. Back to our peaceful Zen state of love.
Paul says: Let’s review. There is a scientific definition of love. Yes, I know that the romantics hate it when I use the words scientific and love in the same sentence but I need to because it is true. According to the white coats, love has three components: passion, intimacy and commitment. See, lust is good because it is one of the parts of love but it is not enough since it is only 33.333333 (repeating) percent. We can equate lust with passion but what about the other pieces?
This brings us to the first of our ‘love is…’ topic: Love is trusting.
Since we are reviewing, remember back to the topic of sex. Sex is not intimacy. Making love has nothing to do with the location of one’s genitalia. Intimacy is in the mind and in being vulnerable with your lover. It is a combination of convincing ourselves that we are trusting and demonstrating to our loved one that we trust them. Being trustworthy is a big plus also.
Which brings me to prenuptial agreements. As a legal tool, they are a great idea. I am a big fan of contracts and legal agreements and any other way that lawyers and the Devil can bind the weak minded to their wills. Sadly, as a tool of love, it is a declarative statement that the party of the first part does not, in its entirety, trust the party of the second part. If you can sign the pre-nup while looking the other person in the eye and informing them, in no uncertain terms, that you do not trust them and, therefore, cannot be intimate with them on a basic Maslowian level of sustenance then go right ahead and draw up the documents.
Putting all of my wordy sarcasm aside, maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad idea if everybody listed out all of the things that they can’t trust in their lives. I do not trust that you love me. I do not trust that I am sexy enough or beautiful enough to keep you. I do not trust that God will let me be happy.
The last one was for me. In all of the therapy that I have done, the bottom line to my issues, and subsequently the underlying reason that I could not be intimate, was that I did not trust God. Somewhere in my subconscious, I believed that God was kind of willy-nilly and that at any moment He would cut the thread and let me drop into whatever pool of misery was in store for me. From my own experience, I can say that there is a hierarchy to this. First, trust in God then in yourself then in your loved ones then in the world at large. From there, I was able to love God, love myself, love Lee, and then love everybody else. I will admit that I did not learn them in that order but it would have been a hell of a lot easier if I had.
Now you know why Lee does most of the writing. I just get all philosophical and shit.